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I recently picked up a cheap Samsung laser printer and decided to give the Samsung Unified Linux Driver Repository a shot while installing it. Basically the SULDR is a repository you add to your /etc/apt/sources.list file which allows you to install one of their driver management applications. Once that is installed anytime you go to hookup a new printer the management application automatically searches the repository, full of the official Samsung printer drivers, finds the correct one for you and installs it. Needless to say I didn’t have any problems getting this printer to work on linux!

I am currently running a variety of distributions, primarily Linux Mint 17.Previously I was running KDE 4.3.3 on top of Fedora 11 (for the first experiment) and KDE 4.6.5 on top of Gentoo (for the second experiment). Check out my profile for more information.

I might be a little frustrated at this point, but please – let me explain myself before you start with the ‘Haha, Linux noobie.’ comments.

After 45 minutes of tinkering, I finally got network printing working on my laptop. To elaborate, I have a Samsung ML-2510 monochrome laser printer hooked up to my Windows Home Server machine (which I am now able to access no problem), shared across the workgroup. ‘No problem!’ I thought to myself. ‘Samba loves me.’ Right?

WRONG. My trials and tribulations first started when adding the printer driver itself. ‘Input a model here’ taunted me with its ease of use, and sure enough typing in ‘ML-2510′ brought up my printer. After clicking ‘Forward’ and waiting a moment, there was… nothing. No driver available for download.

My next roadblock came in the form of the beautiful SELinux feature built into Fedora 11. For those of you not in the know, SELinux stands for ‘Security-Enhanced Linux’ and basically provides a crap ton of enhanced security policies not otherwise available. While not a Linux distribution unto itself, many new distributions are starting to include it for added security. At any rate, SELinux did not at all like my Samsung Unified Printer Driver, available for download from the Samsung site.

30 minutes of frustration later, after test pages failed to print and SELinux reports were being generated en masse, I just turned it onto ‘Permissive’ mode. Voila! I could now print.

The only question I can think of from this is ‘Why did they make this so hard?’ It should have, realistically, worked after I installed the Samsung driver and chose my printer.